Karly

There was a period during the pandemic when I was completely obsessed with The Luminaries. I read Eleanor Catton’s enormous, 800-something-page novel twice in the conventional sense, once in English and once in Spanish, and then, apparently deciding that this was still an insufficient amount of time to spend in 1860s Hokitika, I read it again in chronological order. This is not particularly easy to do with a novel whose entire architecture depends on time being revealed in the wrong order, but it did mean that, for a while, I knew an unreasonable amount about fictional people looking for gold on the West Coast of New Zealand in 1866.

A few years later, however, there is something else about The Luminaries that I cannot stop thinking about, and it has very little to do with astrology, murder or missing gold. It is the fact that Catton’s Hokitika is full of people who have arrived from somewhere else, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, China, America and elsewhere, brought to the same small corner of New Zealand by migration, colonial expansion and, most immediately, the possibility that there might be gold beneath their feet. When the novel became a television series, something that had always existed silently on Catton’s pages became impossible to ignore, because suddenly all of those people had voices, they did not all sound alike and, historically, they shouldn’t have.

In fact, The Luminaries takes place at almost exactly the right moment for us to ask a much bigger question, what did New Zealand sound like before it sounded like New Zealand?

New Zealand English is unusually useful to linguists because it is young, not young in the sense that English had never been spoken in New Zealand before the nineteenth century, nor in the rather uncomfortable colonial sense of pretending that the linguistic history of Aotearoa began when British settlers arrived, because te reo Māori had, of course, existed there for centuries, but young in the sense that the particular variety of English we now recognise as New Zealand English developed following large-scale European settlement in the nineteenth century.

This means that its beginnings sit unusually close to the invention of recorded sound. We cannot listen to eighteenth-century Americans and work backwards to hear exactly how their English became American English, nor can we put a microphone in front of a seventeenth-century Londoner before he boards a ship for Virginia, but with New Zealand English we can get remarkably close.

Between 1946 and 1948, the New Zealand National Broadcasting Service sent a Mobile Unit around the country to record the memories of older New Zealanders, and among the people captured on those enormous recording discs were speakers born as early as the 1850s. Many belonged to the first generations born during the period of large-scale British settlement and, when linguist Elizabeth Gordon rediscovered the recordings decades later, they became the foundation of what is now the Origins of New Zealand English project at the University of Canterbury, giving researchers the extraordinary opportunity to listen to people who had been children while a recognisably New Zealand variety of English was still emerging.

The fascinating thing is that those earliest speakers do not all sound particularly New Zealand, instead they sound different from one another, preserving features associated with the different dialects spoken by the people who had arrived before them, and that is where our gold miners come in.

Everyone is going to New Zealand

Gold was discovered in payable quantities in Otago in 1861 and, as tends to happen whenever someone announces that there is a fortune sitting in the ground, people came running. Thousands arrived at Gabriel’s Gully, including miners who had already followed gold to Victoria in Australia, and when the Otago rush began to decline, miners moved again towards new discoveries on the West Coast.

Gold rushes create peculiar communities because the population does not grow slowly, a village does not spend two hundred years becoming a town while the grandchildren of its original inhabitants marry the grandchildren of their neighbours, instead people arrive quickly and in enormous numbers because everybody has heard the same rumour, and Hokitika, the setting of The Luminaries, was one of those places.

Catton’s characters consequently exist in a world of arrivals. Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika at the beginning of the novel, Anna Wetherell has crossed the world to make a new life, and around them are British settlers, Australians, Māori characters, Chinese characters and people whose histories extend far beyond the small town in which the novel brings them together, so its obsession with movement, fortune and reinvention makes perfect sense within a place whose population had been transformed almost overnight. More importantly for us, every one of those people would have brought a linguistic history with them.

English settlers did not arrive speaking one neat nineteenth-century “English accent”, because someone from London did not necessarily sound like someone from Yorkshire, who did not sound like someone from Cornwall, while Scottish and Irish migrants brought still more varieties into the mix and Australians arrived with a colonial variety of English already developing on the other side of the Tasman. North Americans formed a much smaller proportion of the English-speaking settler population, but they too were present within the extraordinary international movement of people produced by successive nineteenth-century gold rushes, meaning that a place like Hokitika could bring together people whose speech had developed thousands of miles apart and who, without gold, might never have found themselves living in the same town.

The demographic mixture behind early New Zealand English was substantial. Peter Trudgill, Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret Maclagan, in their work on new-dialect formation, estimate the origins of the anglophone settler population up to 1881 at roughly 49 per cent English, 22 per cent Scottish, 20 per cent Irish, 7 per cent Australian, with smaller Welsh and North American contributions. Those percentages matter because they complicate several seductively simple explanations for where the New Zealand accent came from, including the idea that it was essentially Cockney transported to the other side of the world or that New Zealanders simply acquired their accent from Australians. Modern research instead treats New Zealand English as the product of new-dialect formation, different dialects coming into sustained contact and, over generations, producing something that is not quite any one of them.

Nobody, then, simply got off a boat speaking New Zealand English, because New Zealand English happened after they got there.

But The Luminaries is even more multilingual than that

One of the things that makes Catton’s Hokitika so useful for thinking about this period is that British and Irish settlers were never the whole story, because the gold rushes also brought Chinese migration into nineteenth-century New Zealand, particularly from Guangdong in southern China. By 1866, European miners were abandoning parts of the Otago fields for newer discoveries on the West Coast and the Otago provincial government actively encouraged Chinese miners to come and work claims that others had left behind, with many intending to earn money in New Zealand before eventually returning to China.

This history appears in The Luminaries through characters such as Quee Long and Sook Yongsheng, and it matters because a goldfield was not merely a meeting point between different kinds of English, it was multilingual. Cantonese and other Chinese varieties existed alongside different varieties of English and te reo Māori, and the linguistic landscape of a gold town would consequently have been considerably more complicated than the convenient image of a collection of British settlers slowly developing funny vowels together.

That does not mean we can draw a satisfying little family tree and announce that Cantonese gave modern New Zealand English this vowel while Scottish English supplied that consonant, because historical linguistics is unfortunately less accommodating to a good narrative than that. The strongest evidence for the phonological formation of New Zealand English concerns the mixture of English dialects brought predominantly by settlers from England, Scotland and Ireland, alongside Australian influence, and researchers have been able to trace the survival, competition and eventual levelling of features associated with different varieties without reducing the modern accent to any single immigrant source.

Chinese migration belongs to the linguistic history of the goldfields without our needing to invent a direct phonological influence that the evidence cannot demonstrate, and the same care is necessary when we talk about te reo Māori, with one enormous difference, Māori was not an immigrant language arriving at the goldfields at all, it was already there. To imagine nineteenth-century New Zealand as a blank linguistic landscape onto which British dialects were deposited would be to misunderstand the country in which this new English was forming, and although modern New Zealand English carries obvious Māori influence in its vocabulary, names and cultural language, the relationship between English and te reo Māori also belongs to a much larger history of colonisation, suppression, contact and revival that cannot really be reduced to the origin story of an accent.

What we can say is that the world represented by The Luminaries would have sounded extraordinarily varied, and that becomes even more interesting when we stop listening to the people who had arrived and start listening to their children.

The children made an accent

This may be my favourite part of the entire story because languages have a habit of refusing to behave as neatly as adults would like them to. The first generation of settlers could keep the accents they had brought with them, because a Scottish miner did not cease sounding Scottish when his ship reached Dunedin and an Irish family did not arrive in Otago and wake up the next morning speaking New Zealand English, but their children were growing up surrounded by people whose English did not necessarily resemble their parents’ English, hearing different pronunciations at home, in the street and eventually at school, then speaking to other children whose parents might have come from completely different places.

The Education Act of 1877 established a national system of free, compulsory and secular primary education, creating yet another environment in which children from different settler backgrounds spent large amounts of time together. School did not single-handedly invent New Zealand English, obviously, but children and adolescents are enormously important in situations of dialect contact because their linguistic world is not limited to the speech of their parents, and a child whose mother speaks one variety, whose father speaks another, whose neighbours come from somewhere else and whose school friends represent still more backgrounds is receiving a very different set of linguistic inputs from a child growing up inside a relatively isolated and homogeneous community.

The recordings preserved by the Mobile Unit allow linguists to hear something of this process across generations. The earliest-born speakers in the archive display considerable variation, reflecting the different dialects that had entered New Zealand with nineteenth-century migrants, yet a relatively homogeneous variety emerges remarkably quickly, which is where ideas such as dialect contact, accommodation and levelling become useful.

When speakers of mutually intelligible but noticeably different dialects live together, particularly when their children grow up speaking to one another, highly localised or less common features can gradually disappear while other features survive and spread. Children acquiring language inside this mixed environment are not simply copying one ancestral dialect perfectly because the linguistic input around them is itself mixed, and over time that mixture can stabilise until what began as variation between immigrant dialects becomes a new dialect belonging to the place in which those speakers now live.

This is why the story of New Zealand English is not simply the story of immigration, it is the story of what happens after immigration, when people who would never previously have belonged to the same speech community suddenly do, and the gold rush makes a particularly dramatic backdrop for that process because mobility was built into it. A family might leave Ireland, travel to the Australian goldfields, cross the Tasman when another rush began and settle in New Zealand, carrying its English through every stage of that journey before a child was born into an entirely different linguistic environment.

One of the case studies opening the major linguistic history New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution is almost absurdly perfect for this. Richard and Frances Cotter left County Cork for the Ballarat goldfields in Australia before moving to Arrowtown in search of gold, where their daughter Annie was born in 1877, and seventy-one years later somebody recorded her voice. A family moves from Ireland to Australia to New Zealand because of gold, has a daughter in a mining town, and more than a century later linguists can use the way that daughter pronounced her vowels to understand how an accent was being born, because language history is very rarely kind enough to leave receipts like these.

It is also why the goldfields provide such a useful contrast with parts of New Zealand where settlement was more homogeneous. In areas of Otago and Southland with particularly strong Scottish settlement, Scottish features could persist for longer, while more mixed communities created precisely the conditions in which levelling between dialects was likely to occur. The emerging accent was therefore not simply the mathematical average of every person who stepped off a nineteenth-century ship, it was shaped by who settled where, who spoke to whom, which features were common enough to survive and, eventually, which forms the New Zealand-born generations adopted from one another.

So what would The Luminaries actually have sounded like?

Probably not like New Zealand as we hear it today, and that is what makes the television adaptation particularly interesting, because a novel can tell us where somebody comes from while television has to make a decision about what comes out of their mouth, every character has to sound like something. Having read the novel in both English and Spanish, I find this particularly fascinating because written translation can recreate differences in vocabulary, register, formality and social position, but the moment the story becomes television, geographical origin can become audible before a character has explained anything about themselves at all.

When we watch a drama set in New Zealand now, a New Zealand accent immediately locates us, telling us where we are before a script necessarily has to, but applying one uniform modern accent to a drama set in an 1860s gold-rush town would actually erase one of the most fascinating things about that historical moment, because there was not yet a settled national voice for everybody to share.

Instead, imagine walking through Hokitika and hearing the British Isles broken into pieces around you, English regional dialects, Irish English, Scottish voices, Australian English, American voices, Cantonese and other varieties spoken by Chinese migrants, te reo Māori, and people who had already lived in several countries and whose speech may itself have reflected that movement. The soundscape should be messy because the population was messy, and this is perhaps where The Luminaries, whether deliberately or not, gives us a particularly useful way of understanding new-dialect formation.

Its characters are obsessed with where they came from and what they might become, almost everybody has crossed something, an ocean, a social boundary, a moral boundary and occasionally all three, while Hokitika offers the possibility of reinvention because nobody seems entirely fixed there. Neither, yet, is the English, because the people we meet in 1866 belong to the generation supplying the raw material and their children and grandchildren will do the linguistic rearranging.

There is something particularly fitting about encountering this through a novel that is itself so obsessed with chronology. Reading The Luminaries in chronological order changes the experience because suddenly events that Catton deliberately scattered across the novel are placed back into sequence, causes sit beside their consequences and the enormous machinery of the plot becomes visible in a different way. Looking at the linguistic history surrounding the novel does something oddly similar, because instead of beginning with the New Zealand accent as a finished thing and asking where its features came from, we can return to the 1860s, listen to the different populations being brought together and watch the conditions for that accent assemble themselves in roughly chronological order.

An accent is an archive

We tend to think about migration through things we can see, ships, passenger lists, census records, buildings, photographs, clothes packed into trunks, recipes that survive because somebody teaches them to a child who eventually teaches them to another child. We can point to a Chinese mining settlement or a Scottish church and recognise immediately that people carried pieces of somewhere else with them, but they carried their voices too.

That may be why the history of New Zealand English feels particularly intimate, because an accent can survive a journey without anybody consciously deciding to preserve it and it can change without anybody consciously deciding to abandon it. People simply speak, their children listen, their children speak to other children, features disappear, survive, shift and combine until eventually somebody notices that the children do not quite sound like their parents anymore.

By around 1900, people were noticing, with contemporary observers complaining about the emerging “colonial twang” and often blaming children for speaking incorrectly. The accusation is almost funny with hindsight because those children were not failing to reproduce British English properly, they were participating in the creation of New Zealand English, turning the mixture of voices around them into something that increasingly belonged not to England, Ireland, Scotland or Australia, but to New Zealand.

Perhaps that is the linguistic story hiding underneath The Luminaries. Catton gives us a society preoccupied with gold because gold explains why so many of these people are in the same place at the same time, it explains the ships and the strangers, the sudden fortunes, the disappearances and the possibility that somebody might travel halfway around the world and become someone else, but migration leaves behind things nobody was looking for.

The miners found gold, lost gold, stole it, hid it and followed rumours of it from one side of the world to another, while the people around them arrived carrying English from Cork, London, Scotland, Australia and elsewhere, carrying Cantonese and other Chinese varieties from Guangdong, speaking te reo Māori in the country where it had been spoken long before any of those ships appeared on the horizon. Gold explains why this extraordinary collection of voices ended up together, but it does not quite explain what happened once they did, because for that we have to listen to their children, who inherited all those voices, levelled some differences, retained others, changed still more and, without ever sitting down to decide that New Zealand required an accent of its own, began creating one.

The people who came looking for gold arrived sounding like everywhere else, and their children began to sound like New Zealand.

Sources and further reading

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury and Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Peter Trudgill, Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret Maclagan, “Determinism in New-Dialect Formation and the Genesis of New Zealand English”, Journal of Linguistics, 2000.

Elizabeth Gordon, “The Origins of New Zealand Speech: The Limits of Recovering Historical Information from Written Records”, English World-Wide, 1998.

University of Canterbury, Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) Project and Mobile Unit archive.

Jennifer Hay and Margaret A. Maclagan, New Zealand English, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “Speech and accent”, “Gold and gold mining” and material on Chinese miners in nineteenth-century New Zealand.

Manatū Taonga, New Zealand History, material on the Otago and West Coast gold rushes.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, 2013.

The Luminaries, television adaptation written by Eleanor Catton, BBC/TVNZ, 2020.